BEST VALUE NON DUSTY BEDDING?

[Kelly Marks]

A thread so we can compare and contrast! When I use bedding (during the winter) I think the cardboard is excellent. It's very expensive though - I need to verify this but I think it's around £6 a bale and you'd need to put at least 4 in to make a bed and I'd use about 3 a week to keep it nice for them.

I will try and get weights, exact price plus the name of the bedding! Do try and make future posts more helpful and precise than mine!!!

[anastasia55555]

Home made shredded paper
Price - Free
Quantity - as much as you can be bothered to put through the shredder or shred newspapers by hand.

I mix it with straw (obviously no longer dust free though), and if you use it on top of rubber matting, would reduce the amount you need. Found it soaks up wee well, as find straw isnt very good at that, so the two together, one for soaking up, other for plumping out.

[steve]

I also believe paper and cardboard is supposesd to be the only dust free bedding, as I know some of the big horse hospitals use it.

[aero]

We used to use Cardboard but now use wood pellets, much cheaper, easier to muck out and surprisingly not really dusty at all. Cardboard was £4:50 a bag +vat+delivery Pellets are about £2:40 a bag+vat no delivery charge as we are local to Liverpool Wod Pellets delivery range. We are even closer to the Cardboard place, but they insisted on £20 delivery.
Actually there are 5 bags of Cardboard here free to anyone who can be bothered to come and take them off my hands!

[Mollymoo]

We use sawdust and believe it or not it's not dusty! I don't know how they do it but the by-product from the wood mill is passed through a machine and bagged up. I pay £3.50 a bag and it takes 6-8 bags to get started and then a new bag about every 5 days. It's much easier for mucking out than shavings and most wood mills are selling it now. Molly loves her nice warm cozy bed

[Kelly Marks]

www.greenbale.co.uk/
Here's the website - it's super stuff - last invoice says 50 x £4.70 = £235 + VAT

[alijohnson]

Hi guys, we actually manufacture - well recycle cardboard and make it into bedding, our bales are 25kg the same shape and size as a shavings bag and it is excellent, mostly mixed paper and cardboard and if you have rubber matting you only need 2 bales to give you a really good bed and probably 1 bale a week to keep it clean and offer a good bed, more absorbant than shavings, more bio degradable than anything else and eco friendly, our bales are £4.00 and we deliver locally - free for more than 10 bales, long distance can be arranged for enough bags. Shavings here are £6.50 per bale. We are a newish company and are relying on getting ourselves established to make it work. If anyone is interested drop me a message with where you are and I will give you a price - sorry Kelly couldn't miss the opportunity!! Personally I prefer this bedding to anything else and it helps the environment too.

[gwenoakes]

Cardboard or newspaper without a doubt, although I wouldnt say it was totally dust free. We make our own and also sell. Wasnt meant to be a business, but had interest so we took the bull by the horns so to speak.

It all started originally because I was being a tight ass and looking for cheaper bedding!

[Deleted]

I tried Megazorb which is wood pulp type stuff - it looks like cat litter I found it took a lot (14 bags) to make a deep enough bed with no rubber matting. it is very absorbent, but at £6 a bag it's expensive (a bag is only about 1/2 a shavings bale).

You're supposed to deep litter which makes it more cost effective but I prefer daily mucking out. I'm now on shavings at £7.33 a bale.

Paper and card are about the same price as shavings here Maybe I should start making my own and/ or selling it!! Gwenoakes - where are you? If you're not nearby, what sort of shredder have you got, how much did it cost and how much bedding can you make in a day?

Aubiose is becoming very popular for deep littering.

[zack&buffysmum]

Another vote for wood pellets here. Totally non dusty and VERY cheap if you buy in bulk. Also very quick to muck out.

[penny70]

Wood pellets here too - really easy to use and very cheap.

[christi]

ive used Aubiose for 2 years now , its very absorbent , although i have to say there is still a minimal amount of dust, just make sure your horse is out when laying a new bale , i lift dung daily , rake over the top so as not to disturb the base. it costs £10.30 per bale here .

[hazelhorse]

We use miscanthus which is very much an environmentaly friendly bedding. It is carbon neutral, requires no interference from the farmer other than to cut it, so provides a good home for wildlife etc. In our case we get ours unbagged direct from the farmer, but it is available dust extracted and bagged. There is very minimal dust, and even our product which is not extracted and has some dust, doesnt seem to cause any reaction from horses stabled on it. We have a few horses with stable coughs and not one of them has any reaction to the miscanthus.

Cost wise, we buy ours by the trailer load, but it works out roughly at the equivalent of £3.75 per bale.

[lilaclomax]

Another vote for wood pellets here too.. we get a tonne at a time and it works out really cheap, I use 1 bag a week in the winter at £3.30 for 15kg.
People sometimes say it gets dusty in the summer when sweeping up but I have found that the dust tends to be from everything else and not the pellets... if it is getting dry I have found a watering can works wonders

I should add that I have rubber mats apart from in the back right corner of the stable which is where I use the pellets straight onto the floor. Shadow uses that area as a toilet and the underneath of his mats stay bone dry as the pellets soak everything up.
It does take a while to get used to using it and 'leaving wet behind' but any wet is mixed back in a is gone by the evening.

[lc]

I like megazorb on rubber but it's £7.20 a bag here and I used a bag and a half a week on my 14hh pony a week. It can get dusty if you don't wash off your horses feet as it dries the mud which then builds up in the bed.

Last year I tried the wood pellets, they were ok but I needed about 2-3 10kg bags a week, they cost me £4 a bag so not much different in price at the end of the day, however a friend said to try aquamax as although they appear the same as the cheap wood pellets they are in actual fact a lot better quality and more absorbant that any of the cheaper alternatives she's tried.

I'm not sure what to try this year with my new horse, she's bigger and I don't know how clean she is, Simba was a very clean mare but was quite wet. I lost Simba due to EFE, and although the bedding most probably wasn't a cause there's a nagging doubt in my mind now about wood pellets, which is probably very silly as a lot of people use them without a problem and it was most likely co-incidence that she suffered a strangulation of her instetine this year, but the bedding is the only thing I changed, and it just plays on my mind.

I do like the absorbant qualities of the wood pellets, so may still use them, but put shavings on top, to give a slightly deeper bed.